Bible literalists are liars

I was viewing a forum the other day over at freedomainradio.com where an anarchist was talking about christianity with a professed christian. There was a fundamental disconnect… The anarchist assumed that when the christian said that he believed the bible was the inerrant word of god and was literally true, that he was telling the truth. The bible contains a lot of unsavory, unpalletable moments. Moments where god looks like a real asshole.

Slight digression here: Some say that there’s no way we should put human feelings on our imaginary friends (gods, laprechauns, unicorns, whatever). They are totally different from us and there’s no way we can understand their motivations. We live in the world. Our motivations stem from our interactions with the world. Imaginary beings do not live in the world. Their motivations are fiction. They do not have motivations. We can imagine whatever kind of motivations we want for them. The author(s) of the bible gave god many human-esque motivations, and I think its silly to say that we shouldn’t judge god by human standards especially since we don’t have any other standards to judge god by. We let dogs and cats and other animals get away with crap (property damage etc.) because we judge them by lower standards. We know that they do not understand the value of property or life etc. Extending the parallel, we should judge god by higher standards than what we hold people to because he understands everything. Digression over.

It’s not just god though… many of the main characters are violent, vicious, bloodthirsty sons of bitches. The conduct of the Israelites in war is pretty damn harsh. The bible condones slavery, stoning, and hosts of other things that are morally reprehensible, often as punishments for what we would consider slight transgressions, like speaking back to ones parents.

So when a person says that they believe in the literal inerrant truth and rectitude of that document, its can be unsettling. They are basically saying that they believe it is morally right, perhaps even mandatory to obey these vicious laws and strictures.

But thank goodness for one thing: They are lying. These people are relatively harmless. I don’t want to say that they are completely harmless… compulsive liars are not the safest people to be around, but there is little risk of them actually stoning you. See, they don’t actually in their core believe that stoning is appropriate behavior. You can tell, because even in the most conservative, fundamentalist homes, the incidence of stoning is very low. They aren’t actually cool with raping one’s enemies wives, because there are very few fundamentalist christians who are actually rapists. They don’t believe that sodomy is a sin warranting death, because there are fundamentalists indulging in it all the time.

They’ll deny it, of course. They will claim to believe that the bible is true. But actions speak louder than words. Actual bible literalists are few and far between. Thank goodness.